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So unlike Hannity to go easy on a Trump.Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Even though a team of White House aides reportedly worked on his initial response to the scandal surrounding his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, it took Donald Trump Jr. several more tries to explain what happened during the meeting — and eventually he just posted an entire possibly incriminating email chain.

Of course, Sean Hannity did not press Trump Jr. on the discrepancies in his public statements when he appeared on his show Tuesday night. Trump Jr. said he viewed the meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya as “opposition research,” though we now know the initial email pitch included the line “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. said he thought Veselnitskaya may have “concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about, probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign, so I think I wanted to hear it out.”

Hannity was happy to focus on the media’s failures, and even started out the broadcast by criticizing mainstream journalists directly, calling them “overpaid, lazy, rigid left-wing ideologues.”

But Trump Jr. took a less strident tone, and even suggested that entertaining an offer to cooperate with a foreign government hoping to influence the U.S. election might have been unwise. “In retrospect I probably would have done things a little differently,” he said.